If a system is based on a userbase pulling the ladder from under them in order to make sure only they can benefit from it, then it's not a good or fair system from the get go.
Maybe the issue is with the definition of the profession of artist, that's it's too vague and fluid allowing anyone to claim to be one without much hassle.
But then if you have a strict definition of the artist profession, everyone will rush to conform to the bare minimum of that in order to score those benefits.
So maybe then the core issue is with the welfare state that unfairly picks winners and losers instead of being "universal".
Artist have exited way before the welfare state has. They were poor and had patrons who supported them if they loved their work. So then why do we need the state to subsidize this now? Do we have proof this leads to higher quality art?
Is that even possible? Someone has to pay for it. If I'm rich and I get $40,000 a year from UBI, but my direct or indirect taxes go up by $60,000 in order to fund the program, am I really receiving UBI? At some point UBI has to involve transfers between income or wealth levels. The particulars of how the program is funded determines how progressive or regressive the policy is in net.
The whole point is that paying everyone a fixed $X amount regardless of anything else is extremely easy to manage, so you can drop all the bureaucracy that builds up around welfare. But, yes, in practice it also acts as a progressive income tax of sorts even with an otherwise flat tax rate (which allows for further simplification) because delta between UBI check and taxes is going to gradually decrease as income rises and eventually becomes negative.
That said even with just personal income tax it's viable. I once crunched the numbers on what it'd take to have everyone in US receive the current federal min wage as UBI payment, assuming a flat surface tax (i.e. relying solely on that UBI check to make it progressive), and it was somewhere in the ballpark of 50%.
Of course, you can get there much easier if you go for the sacred cows such as capital gains. Raising that to the same level as regular income alone would bring a lot of tax revenue.
We could also start taxing AI, since it is (or at least positioned by those deploying it) the immediate cause why so many people are going to find themselves out of jobs.
Maybe the issue is with the definition of the profession of artist, that's it's too vague and fluid allowing anyone to claim to be one without much hassle.
But then if you have a strict definition of the artist profession, everyone will rush to conform to the bare minimum of that in order to score those benefits.
So maybe then the core issue is with the welfare state that unfairly picks winners and losers instead of being "universal".
Artist have exited way before the welfare state has. They were poor and had patrons who supported them if they loved their work. So then why do we need the state to subsidize this now? Do we have proof this leads to higher quality art?